I told her about a piece of research I’d long wanted to carry out: to work together with an organisational psychologist to look at exactly this question, and to interview senior executives, perhaps from the oil industry or pharmaceutical companies or arms manufacturers, and ask them to reflect on how they are able to maintain their own values while continuing with their work (if indeed they have been able to). She seemed to be intrigued by this idea, but I also sensed a discomfort at moving from the historical examples we’d been discussing into our contemporary world. My thoughts triggered another memory for her, and she mentioned a speech she gave in Cheltenham some years ago, when she was pretty sure she addressed the question of how these conflicting forces interacted in Speer’s career. She’d try to dig out her notes on this for when we met. We fixed a date for supper at her house in Warwick Avenue a few weeks later, in November.
Regrets, I’ve had a few. But this one still niggles away. She rang me a couple of days before we were going to have supper to say that she was in quite a lot of pain due to a medical condition, so could we rearrange our meeting? Of course, no problem. But then I was in America for two weeks with a colleague from Platform, giving the keynote lecture at a conference in Pittsburgh. And when I returned we had to deal immediately with a backlog of work, so anything non-urgent got pushed back to the new year … Before I knew it, months had passed, and the supper was not rescheduled. A couple of years later I saw her interviewed for a documentary about Diana Athill, who had been Gitta’s editor (a brilliant one by all accounts), on her riveting and terrifying book about Franz Stangl (Into That Darkness). She looked much older and frailer, and again I thought about getting back in touch, but didn’t. It seemed that too much time had passed. Never mind, I’d send her a copy of my book when it was finally published.
Then, one day in June 2012, reading the Guardian, I turned a page and, with a stab of sadness, saw that she had died, Sadness that her fertile and remarkable mind was no longer in our world, but also a keen sense of loss at a conversation between us that had started, and now would never be finished. The obituary described her ‘extraordinarily intense process of writing and researching’ and her ‘passion to understand and … intense moral commitment’ which helped her to become such a formidable expert on the psychology of the Third Reich. But, however praising of her work, I didn’t feel this account quite reflected the enormous influence that her books on Stangl and Speer have had. I’ve lost count of the number of people I’ve spoken to about these works, and how profoundly they have shaped their ways of thinking. They are some of the very few books that you could say are absolutely essential to our world; they should be required reading not only for all politicians, but for anyone seeking to understand power of any kind.
Yet, perhaps important conversations find their ways of continuing, even after death. More than twenty years since first reading her book on Speer, I still sense her, here at my shoulder, a companion in spirit on this journey.
*
There is a word, a German compound noun, which has been at the heart of my thinking and research over the last twenty years: ‘Schreibtischtaeter’.
‘Schreib’ (rhymes with ‘scribe’) means to write.
‘Tisch’ (rhymes with ‘dish’) is a table.
So ‘Schreibtisch’ is a table that you write at, or work at – we could call it a desk.
‘Taeter’ (rhymes with ‘later’ or ‘dictator’) comes from the root ‘tun’, to do, so a ‘Taeter’ is a doer.
But the actions of a ‘Taeter’ are not neutral – in fact, the way this word is used in Germany is nearly always pejorative. A ‘Taeter’ does things that are either criminal – stealing cars, dealing drugs, etc.– (for instance, ‘sex offender’ in German is Triebtaeter) – or seriously disapproved of by many in society – killing animals, bullying people, extreme antisocial behaviour. Therefore, the closest translation we can get to this in English, I would say, is ‘perpetrator’. So, if we put all this together:
Schreibtisch + Taeter is a ‘desk perpetrator’ – i.e. a bureaucratic criminal.
However, this still doesn’t quite convey the seriousness or weight of the word. The clear implication of ‘Schreibtischtaeter’ from its early usage was somebody who killed from their desk – the figure who, by giving orders, uses paper or a phone or a computer to kill, instead of a gun. So, the term I will use in this work is ‘desk killer’.fn3
It is extremely hard to pinpoint in history the exact first use of the term ‘Schreibtischtaeter’ in German (or indeed ‘desk murderer’ or ‘desk killer’ in English), but the concept certainly gained widespread currency around the time of Adolf Eichmann’s trial in Jerusalem in 1961. The word is often associated with Hannah Arendt’s work, and her widely misquoted, and poorly understood, concept of ‘the banality of evil’, but, curiously, although she writes extensively about the concept behind ‘killing from a desk’, the phrases ‘desk killer’ or ‘desk murderer’ themselves do not appear anywhere in Eichmann in Jerusalem, published in 1963, two years after the trial. Arendt first uses ‘desk murderer’ in 1966, in the introduction she writes for Bernd Naumann’s book on the Auschwitz trials in Frankfurt. And then, almost as if to make up for lost time, she uses the phrases ‘desk murderer’ and ‘desk murder’ no fewer than eight times in twenty pages. So it is clear that in the years between the Eichmann trial in 1961 and the publication of Naumann’s book Auschwitz five years later, this phrase had become well known, and didn’t require clarification in Arendt’s introduction. To understand how much the concept had entered popular culture by this time, you only need to listen to Dylan singing ‘Masters of War’ in 1963 – ‘Come, you masters of war, / You that build the big guns … You that hide behind walls, / You that hide behind desks.’
If there is a single individual responsible for inventing this term – or at least the concept behind the term – then I think it is Gideon Hausner, the leading prosecuting counsel in the Eichmann trial. Hausner, whatever his intellectual limitations and weakness for courtroom theatrics, made a remarkable speech, opening the prosecution on 17 April 1961, including these reflections on the changing nature of the figure of the ‘killer’ in society, and how the judicial process would also need to change to reflect these new developments: ‘In this trial, we shall also encounter a new kind of killer,2 the kind that exercises his bloody craft behind a desk.’ He then goes on to describe the power of Eichmann, the epitome of the desk killer, the bureaucrat who has no need to get his own hands dirty because, as he explains:
it was his word that put gas chambers into action; he lifted the telephone, and railway trains left for the extermination centres; his signature it was that sealed the doom of tens of thousands … We shall find Eichmann describing himself as a fastidious person, a ‘white-collar’ worker … yet he was the one who planned, initiated and organized, who instructed others to spill this ocean of blood, and to use all the means of murder, theft, and torture …